The frontend backend debacle

7th November 2010

I’m really starting to get fed up with this useless separation. (Warning: strong personal opinions, based on arguments fallowing).

Ok, it’s not useless, I get the idea in a big team, separation of concerns, better productivity and all that. That’s good and I’m all for that, makes things faster (in the big picture at least). Anyway, what I don’t get is why people that do programming, need to bracket themselves into this kind of name spacing.

Whether you’re programming in JavaScript, php, ruby or java or even LOL-code in the end you are still a programmer. If you think that calling yourself a frontend _, _backend or middle-end developer makes you somehow better, I’ve got news for you: it doesn’t

“It just shows that you can’t actually handle programming in a true sense”

I’m not saying being a js developer is easy, no way! Actually starting to learn the concepts behind js made me a better programmer and helped me getting into more advanced stuff like ruby or clojure. Yes, we have the DOM model and all that stuff, but really, one can abstract that using a library and still write advanced UI’s with little or no performance problems. And don’t get me started on html and css, anyone can learn that, if you can write a hello world java program then, my friend, css and html is a piece of cake.

Baseline ? A true programmer should be able to code in almost any language. If in your team you work as a backender or frontender, that’s ok, but that doesn’t mean you should not know css, html or js or vice-versa, other programming languages and concepts.

You must know the basics and stay up to date, yes it’s not easy, so deal with it and lets stop hiding behind name spaces ok ?